Multi Blog RSS aggregator - help requested

Once upon a time, there were sites that did a good job of mixing the various eve blogs and combining them into an easily consumable view.   That was then, and this is now.

TL;DR:

What easy to maintain method can I use to create, maintain, and distribute a consolidated Eve Blogroll, across multiple platforms?

Research and suggestions are welcome, but what I am really after is hosts and processes that people have direct, recent experience with.

Test feeds are available at :


http://rssmix.com/u/3827027/rss.xml (nearly looks readable directly in firefox and chrome) and
http://rssmix.com/u/3827027/rss.json

The existing resources

There are a few initiatives out there to try to rebuild this.  In my not so humble opinion, I have one of the better (bigger?) meta lists that have current posts viewable in a browser at http://foo-blogroll.blogspot.com.au/

Sugar Kyle has possibly the best (biggest?) master list of eve websites at https://sites.google.com/site/newedensource/ ; followed closely by the OPML list at http://cognitiveindustries.com/opml/index.php

I use feedly to consume my own reading list feeds.

The Whine

Both my list and Sugar's lists suffer from being somewhat manual and painful to maintain.

The cognitive industries site suffers from not having a web or phone browser wrapper around it.  I know how to import an OPML list into some RSS programs, but not very well,  I consider myself  technically competant.  Syncing additions is even harder.

I can't work out how to synchronise my feedly reading list with the published blogroll.  (Yes there is manual processes, but it works so

I find it hard to read my own master blogroll site from my mobile phone.  I believe others would consider it unusable (with some justification).

Restrictions

I want to leach off free solutions; that are not advertising based.

• Free means that I am not reaching into my own pockets, and that I can leave a solution running even once I move onto a new project.  I am not planning on going anywhere; but realistically some form of what happens when I move onto a new game needs to be considered.
• Not advertising based means less work for me blocking undesirable adverts.

I would prefer a simple to set up solution. There are already enough days that I would rather play eve rather than blog about it.  I am not looking for a 3 month job to set up a cloud hosted app.

I don't want to use a home server; my internet connection is neither fast nor reliable enough.

I don't like what the outcome I have with Yahoo pipes; I could not get it to sort in date time correctly. 

http://www.feedcombine.com did not let me create an account.

A possible solution

What I want is a feed consolidator; something that I can easily add and remove sites from, but give users an easy to use and consistent RSS feed to consume. I am prepared to pay a small amount out of pocket for this; but would prefer free

I would then replace my existing blogroll contents and feedly subscription to both point at the same list.  I would also make this feed available for other RSS users to read on their travel time / lunch breaks on their phones/tablets.

But the devil is in the detail.

The best I have come up with so far is http://rssmix.com/

It looks like I can consolidate the 70 or so feeds that I currently consume into a single feed and get what I want to read (and have read) in one spot.  The trick is that, while I can create a new list easily enough, modifying an existing list seems tricky.

I might get away with two layers of technology; one using rssmix.com to build new feeds quickly and easily, and a 'wrapper' feed that gives a consistent end point but takes the rssmix.com.

I have no idea about the people behind rssmix.com; where to get support, how long they plan to be around under their current guise.

So I leave up nearly where I started.

Is rssmix.com the best tool for what I am looking to build?  Has someone else already built it, and I am missing something?  Surely what I am trying to do has already been done.

I threw together an RSS mix based on the current cogntive industries OPML file; and it give us

http://rssmix.com/u/3827027/rss.xml
and
http://rssmix.com/u/3827027/rss.json

I have no idea if this feed process is going to work, or if this is the right tool; but bash it around a little.

It aint over till the lady sings

As readers of this blog know; we had our C1 wormhole invaded.  We organised for a successful defense. 

I am now prepared to announce what we paid for the defence.  0 ISK.

During the initial invasion, I announced to everyone we knew; and some we didn't, that we were being invaded.  I paid attention to what was on kill logs; and what we saw.  Names, Pilots, Ship types.  We found a "friendly" wormhole corp : Daktaklakpak. with their friends Cold Moon Destruction  (since closed I think?)

Daktak and Cold Moon came for the kills of shiny ships.

I did provide Daktak and Cold Moon ammunition.  Some players received more ammo than they consumed;  Others would have consumed more than they spent.  I considered the time spent in logistics and ISK spent in organising ammo well spent.  I would rather the players that can PVP do PVP, and the players that can do ferrying do the ferrying.

However one of our unwelcome guests did leave a scanner in our system, and ran a guerrilla action.  This was annoying.  It never stopped me from doing what I do; PI, industry, research.  Our guest did however crimp the playstyle of some of our member, and then we crimped it even further by putting in a "don't feed kills" policy.

Our solution; move those players that cared into another wormhole, and stop recruiting.  The stop recruiting bit was mildly annoying.

Well, two can play at the lurk as unwanted players in wormholes.  We started asking various corps that we knew had statics to our unwanted guests home wormhole type.  We stalked eve-kill looking for players that had recently lost ships in their home.

We used locator agents to track down their corp members; and noticed that many were highsec missioners. 

Lo and behold; our unwanted guests had their home c4 invaded; their T3's and capital ship destroyed; and were wardecced by 2 different corporations.

We had a hand in some, but not all of this. The enemy of my enemy may be my friend.  Or they may attempt to blow us out of the skies too.  Regardless, we have talked to the relevant parties.

We note with mild interest that our unwanted co-inhabitants have reduced by roughly 40%, with their previous CEO and diplomats moving to new ventures.  Our membership  is largely unchanged.

Without meaning to tempt fate, I think our recent C1 troubled times are over.  The problem with waiting for the lady to sing, is that sometimes you are not around to hear it.  It's not as if invaders will evemail you and say they have given up.  And I am not sure I would believe such an evemail even if I got one.

I don't fly T3's yet.  Given how much effort some players will go to get T3 kills, I am in no rush.  I am tempted to stick with solid, mildly boring ships and learn to fly them better.

Is there money in LowSec? An experiment.

I finally found the time to conduct a little experiment that has been itching me for some time. It had to do with Booster production, Gas harvesting, and being a newbie. I planned to do newbie stuff, with less than 200.000 skill points and see where it gets me. In LowSec. How long until I get killed?

I looked around a bit and since I wanted to explore the Solitude region anyway, it was as good as any other gas cloud region. I podded a new Character to the region and used my JF to bring in some supplies, about 40M worth for the new pilot, the rest to set up camp. Half of that 40M was for one skill: Gas Cloud Harvesting. I trained up Astrometrics first, got him a T1 scanning Frigate  and with absolutely minimal skills I started mapping out the LowSec parts of Solitude, gathering Bookmarks of sites and trying to get a feel for the activity in the region.

The moment I could, I got into this (terrible) little ship:

[Venture]

Gas Cloud Harvester I

Gas Cloud Harvester I

Core Probe Launcher I [Sisters Core Scanner Probe Ix8]

Survey Scanner II

Warp Core Stabilizer I

Small Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I

Small Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I

This. Is. A. Bad. Fit. Don't use it. No tank and fit for what the ship should not be used for: Scanning. It is amazingly cheap to fly, skill and ISK wise, though, and about the only thing you can get fit on it with my limited skills. But that's what it was about. A newbie would fly this.

I ditched the scanning Frig I had and only flew this ship, scanning for the Gas sites I was looking for, cherry picking. Look at it again. No cloak, no tank. I scanned in LowSec sitting there visible and vulnerable, sometimes in a safe spot, but mostly on expired site bookmarks I had found earlier.

Of course I first tried it out in HiSec, and it yielded about 5M/hour worth of gas plus scanning and travel time. I was doing the newbish stuff... selling to local buy orders instead of shipping it out. But 5M isn't that bad, is it?

Next, I set out into LowSec. Getting the good sites there yields nearly 50M ISK an hour, but also requires more scanning and travel time. (The low tier Gas is more abundant here, but really look for the higher tier gases!). In average, I could find a site every 30 minutes, and empty it within an hour. Still, I'm flying in an uncloakable, untanked ship on a character a couple of days old and in an NPC corp.

After 6 (!)days, I got killed for the first time. I was targeted once before on station and docked while scanning, and I was scanned down twice before that but escaped by warping out when DScan showed incoming ship to my location. Ok, the watching DScan is considered a level up for newbies, but everyone tells you to do it... so I went along and did that.

The kill happened like this: I was harvesting Gas (the third cloud of the day) when local blinked and DScan showed a Buzzard in the system for a second, after that: scanner probes. I had seen this before, often people were just flying around updating their bookmarked sites in the area. I caught the Buzzard a couple of times on DScan again while orbiting the Gas cloud at 1000m. (Newbie thing: Not aligned, you know).  New neutrals blinked into Local, and DScan showed me a Jaguar and a Cynabal, and one I didn't catch. I was hauling my gas in shortly before and saw the Buzzard warping close, so I assumed it was on the gas site at the time I got back and started harvesting again. And just as the Jaguar and Cynabal were warping close it uncloaked at 13km off the cloud. I had already initiated warp as it uncloaked and docked on station. There I waited for a bit to see what happens. The Jaguar and Buzzard logged or left system, the Cynabal pilot stayed. I undocked and did a directional scan toward my cloud bookmark to see a Cynabal and some drones. I warped to a nearby planet and verified. The Cynabal was on the site. So I warped back to station and logged on to another character for a bit. When I returned, the Cynabal pilot was docked with me on station. (This was not so newbish, but I wanted to know).

Another newbish thing to do: Undock and start harvesting again. The Cynabal undocked shortly after I started harvesting again. I only got two cycles so it must have been less than 2 or three minutes until he landed on grid after I undocked. From my POV he got me as I was already warping out, probably a skill level or two of any useful skill would have saved the ship. Or a tank if I would have been able to fit one for that matter. Lesson: More skills will make things a lot safer. More skills means: Less time scanning, less time harvesting, a cloak and a lot more survivability. Obvious, right? Except for a newbie, perhaps.

The result of this experiment, thus are:

- 1 Lost Venture (Around 10M ISK, those Sister Probes are expensive)

- 400M in harvested Gas, ready to be processed.

(So much for Risk vs. Reward)

- 100M ISK reward transfered to my killer after this post is published. (I just can't resist).

- The lesson from my killer that I should buy a light saber to bounce his shots back to him. I'd rather fit a tank, thanks, once the alt gets the skills.

All in all, a fun experiment. Also, maybe it's time to deploy some people to gas harvesting regions. The margins seem fair enough, and maybe together with a tank I should fit some tackle on a Venture and look for fun. Hero Venture with T3 Cruiser Drones should be fun. All considered, I really need to do the math on booster production. A single gas site can provide one POS with one day worth of material for standard Boosters, two sites from different regions for improved or strong Boosters. I wonder how the market looks.

There are of course other ways to make money in LowSec. Once you are able to set up a POS, that is.

How to set up POCO's to have different tax rates to different groups

Player owned customs offices are the essential infrastructure that a player corporation needs to set up.

I was chatting with an otherwise experienced player in our corp, and he didn't know that I could set up different rates to different pilots.

We are doing this because in our corps; some pilots would like no fixed commitment. They might only be on a few times/month and are not sure the next time they will be on.  Other players have Command Center 5, Interplanetary consolidation 5, with more pilots than they are prepared to count.

The first pilot wants casual, easy come, easy go.  The second is considering putting up their own POS, bashing their own customs offices.  However even the most ardent PI player considers the cost of a wormhole POS, and many solo pilots will have difficulty bashing their own customs offices.

Our method of distinguishing between these two types of player, both residing in the same POS, is to use two corporations.

We have more than one wormhole; we have more than one corporation anyway.  Each corporation has 7 divisions; so I can provide 'secure' storage many players (depending on a certain lack of large hostile fleets); one corporation based in each wormhole.

Our C2 corp but owns the customs offices in our C1 wormhole.
Our C1 wormhole owns the customs offices in our C2 wormhole.

(No I have not said where we live;  anyone with a modicum of research can work it out).

We have a corp tax POCO rate of 4%, light blue tax rate of 4% and a deep blue tax rate of 0%, and a default tax rate of 5%.

The apparently simpler (but I could not get to work) method of selectively setting your own pilots to deep blue within corp did not seem to work; Corporation rate overrides standing.


I never expected to use our default tax rate.  Who would ever setup to do PI in a system with an established tower, with customs offices all owned by a player corp?  Well it happened.  After our 'interlopers' set up, they then found our towers and ... decided that ours looked far more 'prickly' than theirs did and sued for peace before a shot was even fired.  I like industrialists, and we exchanged light blue.

Copy a bookmark between corporations

Sometimes you have two friendly corps that want to share bookmarks.

Corp A has the bookmark, Corp B does not.

The process is :
Corp A Pilot

• Drag the corp bookmarks to your personal bookmark. This makes a copy
• Drag personal bookmark to your inventory
• If in station; contract or trade your bookmarks to your friends
• If in space; jetcan your bookmarks where your friends can pick them up

 Corp B pilot

• Takes bookmark from contract/trade/jetcan
• Drags them into your personal inventory.
• Drags the to personal  bookmarks.
• Drags them to your corp bookmarks.  This makes a copy
• Roughly 10 minutes later everyone in Corp B has the copied bookmarks.

Highsec Customs office revisited

There have been some updates on highsec Corporate Owned Customs Offices : otherwise misnamed POCO (player owned customs offices), but I assume COCO sounds like a fashion designer or maybe a misspelling of certain drinks and food.

• Highsec POCO can only be attacked while at war.
• Highsec POCO can not be transferred while at war, or with war pending.
• Base rate reduction to PI, reducing tax.  This ranges from 11% for advanced commodities to 20% for basic and refined.
• Highsec POCO to still have NPC tax, with the new Customs Code Expertise skill enabling a NPC tax reduction from 10% to 5% on base rates.

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/player-owned-customs-offices-in-hi-sec

Ok, now I have parroted the CCP announcement (a lot of bloggers do stuff like that), here is my take of semi-random thoughts.

There will be a short term spike in PI as players stockpile customs office gantries and upgrades, even if they make little sense to put up for the average user.  This may spike even higher when Rubicon drops, depending on how flooded the market is by stockpiling speculators.

The reduction of base rates is a nerf to POCO owners; but does somewhat make multi planet PI more attractive where players are currently paying tax.

EDIT : http://evehermit.wordpress.com/2013/10/02/should-have-seen-that-coming/  I think Interbus tax at 17% on exports, so this would drop to around an effective 8.5%.  If this does occur, I need to re-think the value of below for PI farmers owning your own customs offices; and it's ultimate effect on end prices.

There is little value in pure PI farmers owning or even using a highsec POCO over an interbus one.  POCO's are too expensive to put up 'defensively', and for those without the means to defend, simply become a war target magnet.

After the initial land grab; there will still be highsec Interbus customs offices available, just like they are still available in lowsec and wormhole space.

The best value for a highsec POCO is for it's 'shoot me' between these times value.  Owners of customs offices can set within a 2 hour window when their customs offices will be vulnerable.

The next value I see for a highsec POCO is for existing large nullsec alliances to attempt to drive PI prices up by putting their 15% tax on all conveniently placed customs offices.  At roughly 1B ISK per system this seems to have a very poor return on investment.  Targeting all Temperate for Autotrophs/Industrial fibers, or Lava for Felsic Magma/Silicon makes some sense.  No point in specifically targeting Gas for Reactive Gas/Oxidizing Compound as there are far too many gas planets.

POCO owners that charge tax will be able to see who, the value and timing of PI collection.


Forget ice; Industrial Fiber interdictions anyone?

Finally, there might be some value in advertising to highsec PI farmers.  Some of them will click on the customs office to work out who owns what, and read the odd corporate bio.

Highsec PI farmers will get Customs Code Expertise, often to 4, reducing their tax rate to (approx?) 6%. Combined with the drop in base rates; for many players, export tax on Processed commodities will drop from 50 ISK/unit (500isk * 10%) to 24% (400 ISK * 6%), and export tax on advanced commodities will drop from 135,000 ISK/unit to (1,350,000 * 10%) to 72,000 ISK/unit (1,200,000 * 6%)

My guestimate is that the price for demand limited items like Bacteria and Biofuels will fall from roughly 90 ISK (1.8 * tax of 50 ISK)  to 45 ISK (1.8 * tax of 24 ISK).  As I said before, I don't see supply limited items falling anywhere near as much.

I do see some attempt to strangle cheap supply on Temperate and Lava planets, pushing the value of Industrial Fibers and Silicon up.

My expectation that the long term prices for advanced PI will probably drop by 15%, being a combination of more advanced PI being manufactured in highsec at lower taxes, and falling prices on some (but not all) components.


No update on attacking Interbus customs offices. I still think you should be tagged as suspect when attacking one.